How many other things are websites guessing?
Are biased heuristics for the benefit of (a) the website user (the ad target) or (b) the so-called "tech" company and its advertiser customers?
What other HTTP headers are websites ignoring?
Don't guess my language
291–300 of 392 posts
Re: Don't guess my language
#292Much more importantly: Never ever auto-translate content to the user's language.
Present what languages you actually have the data in. The user is smart enough to click the "translate" button in the web browser should they want. That translation is also likely to be better quality.
English is not my first language. Or my second. But I understand it well enough to work in it every day. And I never ever want to wade through auto-translated garbage just to find the right button to read the original English version. Because for some reason this is only a problem for English, web sites using other locales never do it, which should be indication enough that international visitors hate it.
If you ever think about using machine translation tools for you web site, first you must do a full translation round trip for every language before publishing. Translate, paste back the result and translate back. That is roughly what you intended to publish. Don't do it.
Re: Don't guess my language
#293Linguistic nit: that's not what cargo cult means. Cargo cult refers to doing things that don't in themselves do anything, just because XYZ did them, in the mistaken belief that "showing signs of XYZ-ness" will lead to the same results that XYZ sees/produces.
Copying big-name-here's practice of localizing based on IP is not that. Copying "the way they comment the start of every file" would be. Or "using the same pep talk to the full company" would be. Actually using an approach that has both code that actually does something, and has an immediate and measurable effect on the user, isn't.
Re: Don't guess my language
#294I have told the story here before, but I built a neat little system to parse Accept-Language weighing the users priorities and using the closest thing we have on offer to the users preferences. As an example, we have a Brazilian Portuguese translation but not Portugal Portuguese, so we would offer the prior to users requesting the latter for instance unless they had a lower priority but more exact match. From my tech…
I expect many people will have it set to their OS default, and they are just accustomed to it, and don't know how to change it.
Re: Don't guess my language
#295Ideally a browser should ask for languages and country when being installed, in order to correctly fill the Accept-Language field. But that doesn't happen because it would introduce friction.
> Ideally a browser should ask for languages and country when being installed
Yet in reality, a browser asks for language before you download it. (Or buy on the cases that come pre-installed.)
Re: Don't guess my language
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort rules are different in different locales.
It's a circular dependency: how do you sort and list the locales or languages for someone to pick one, when by definition you don't know their locale yet? You have to either make some best-guess approximation (IP geo, browser headers, etc) or use a locale-invariant sort, both of which will be wrong in some cases.
We can find a sorting order with the minimal total distance between where we place a language entry and where this entry would be in that language. If there’s no pair of languages A and Ä such that A > Ä in one and Ä > A in the other, then (I guess???) this total distance will be zero.
Re: Don't guess my language
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.
At least for Kagi they seem to working on solution[0]. But Reddit seems to be fighting back by translating server side so it's no longer detectable. [0] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5212-low-quality-translated-reddi...
Thanks for the link, good to know. Gives me a fuzzy feeling to pay for a search engine whose devs you can actually interact with and are actually working on improving their product.
Re: Don't guess my language
#298Much more importantly: Never ever auto-translate content to the user's language. Present what languages you actually have the data in. The user is smart enough to click the "translate" button in the web browser should they want. That translation is also likely to be better quality. English is not my first language. Or my second. But I understand it well enough to work in it every day. And I never ever want to wade th…
I hate reddit because it auto-translates to French and users have a specific style that would be hard or impossible to really human-translate anyway.
Even if I didn't speak English the translated content would not be worth it.
The feature to change the language or show original content is hard to find and it depends on wether it's the app or mobile web or desktop web.
They also try too hard to make us download the app but that's an other issue.
Re: Don't guess my language
#299My biggest annoyance is with Google. They know who I am, they know I am traveling, they know my language preferences (English) and yet I still get language based on my location on certain pages. I let you track me Google, please use it for some good UX and not just advertising.
Its strange that Google knows I live in the UK and speak English. When I'm signed in to a TV in a hotel room in Spain watching English YouTube videos it then shows me a Spanish advert. Just feels really silly when I don't understand it and they know full well that I don't understand it - still they can charge the advertisers.
Re: Don't guess my language
#300Not accepting Accept-Language is one of my major pet peeves. What makes it worse is that many multilingual websites translate their language-switching buttons and the list of languages to the current language .... which is beyond fucking stupid and defeats the purpose. Wikipedia does this right. The button to switch languages is clear, using a universal multilanguage icon, and a list of languages (using the name of t…
> in alphabetical order Well, it's in an order, but I don't know about alphabetical. I clicked on today's English featured article and looked at the languages: "中文", "Italiano" are "suggested", then the remainder are grouped by geographic region, and aren't particularly alphabetical. They appear to be in groups which are still not alphabetical. Europe seems to have a Cyrillic group but "Қазақша" is shown after "Украї…
> The Chinese languages don't seem to be in stroke order (no expert here)
They are for me. In the Asia section, 中文 ["Chinese"] is listed first, followed by 吴语 ["Wu"] and then 粤语 ["Cantonese"]. Stroke order is first by stroke count and then by an obscure criterion that I don't know (and that, in my experience, Chinese people living in China also don't know), but stroke count is unambiguous and these are in order: 中 4, 吴 7, 粤 12.
Note that they aren't in alphabetical order: 中 Z, 吴 W, 粤 Y.
Japanese appears between Wu and Cantonese for unclear reasons.